Perhaps we don’t hear about the assassination attempt on
Theodore Roosevelt as much as we do some others, because he wasn’t actually
president when it occurred.
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| Roosevelt in 1904 |
Theodore Roosevelt was known as a robust and active man. He
refused to let his health hold him back. As a child, he was somewhat weak, and
his father told him to “make his body.” For the rest of his life he insisted in
engaging in strenuous exercise. People who worked with him had trouble keeping
up with him.
On October 14, 1912 he made his way to the Milwaukee Auditorium
to give a speech. He got into an open-air car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel and
was waving his hat to the crowd when a man fired at him from only a few feet
away with a Colt revolver.
Roosevelt was campaigning for a third term as President. He
had served from 1901 to 1909, and sat out the next four years. In the 1912
campaign, he lost the Republican nomination to incumbent president William
Howard Taft, and so decided to run as a Progressive Party candidate. Heading
out to make his speech, he had folded the fifty or so pages of his planned
address in half and stuck into the inner pocket of his heavy coat. That speech,
along with a case holding his eyeglasses, may have saved his life.
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| John Schrank |
But he also seemed to think he’d seen the ghost of William McKinley, whose assassination in 1901 catapulted Roosevelt to the presidency. Schrank felt he was following McKinley’s wishes in stalking Roosevelt for weeks and trying to kill him. According to Schrank, McKinley told him in a dream that Roosevelt was his murderer and to avenge his death. The man spent the rest of his life in a Wisconsin asylum.
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| Schrank's letter "to the people of the United States" describing his alleged dream of McKinley. |
Roosevelt could tell the wound was minor and insisted on
going ahead with his speech, in spite of what the doctor traveling with him
advised. He declared, “He pinked me,” a fencing term which meant the wound was
not serious but drew blood. Roosevelt avidly studied and practiced fencing
and single stick fighting.
He went to the auditorium to deliver his address. He
declared to the crowd, "I have just been shot…Fortunately, I had my manuscript.
. .and there is where the bullet went through.” He displayed the two holes
through each page of his folded speech.
His party had been nicknamed the Bull Moose Party, for
Roosevelt’s energy and determination. He told the crowd as he displayed the
blood-stained manuscript, “You see, it takes more than one bullet to kill a
Bull Moose.” He spoke for more than an hour. Only at its conclusion did he let
his attendants get him to a hospital.
X-rays showed that the bullet lodged against his fourth
right rib. If the items in his pockets hadn’t deflected it, probably it would
have struck his heart. The doctors decided it was safest to leave the bullet
where it was, rather than to operate, and he carried it for the rest of his
life.
Even though the assassination attempt brought Roosevelt a
lot of sympathy, he lost the election, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson took office.
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Susan
Page Davis is the author of more than sixty published novels. She’s always
interested in the unusual happenings of the past. Her newest books include Echo Canyon, Seven Brides for Seven Texans,
The Saboteur, River Rest, and Tearoom
for Two. She’s a two-time winner of the Inspirational Readers’ Choice Award
and the Will Rogers Medallion, and also a winner of the Carol Award and a
finalist in the WILLA Literary Awards and the More Than Magic Contest. Visit
her website at: www.susanpagedavis.com .
